A large number of peasants and common soldiers were admitted to view the armory at the same time.  The grave custode who showed us the curiosities, explaining every thing in phrases known by heart for years and making the same starts of admiration whenever he came to any thing peculiarly remarkable, singled us out as the two persons most worthy of attention.  Accordingly his remarks were directed entirely to us, and his humble countrymen might as well have been invisible, for the notice he took of them.  On passing out, we gave him a coin worth about fifteen cents, which happened to be so much more than the others gave him, that, bowing graciously, he invited us to write our names in the album for strangers.  While we were doing this, a poor handwerker lingered behind, apparently for the same object, whom he scornfully dismissed, shaking the fifteen cent piece in his hand, and saying:  “The album is not for such as you—­it is for noble gentlemen!”

On our way through the city, we often noticed a house on the southern side of St. Stephen’s Platz, dedicated to “the Iron Stick.”  In a niche by the window, stood what appeared to be the limb of a tree, completely filled with nails, which were driven in so thick that no part of the original wood is visible.  We learned afterwards the legend concerning it.  The Vienna Forest is said to have extended, several hundred years ago, to this place.  A locksmith’s apprentice was enabled, by the devil’s help, to make the iron bars and padlock which confine the limb in its place; every locksmith’s apprentice who came to Vienna after that, drove a nail into it, till finally there was room for no more.  It is a singular legend, and whoever may have placed the limb there originally, there it has remained for two or three hundred years at least.

We spent two or three hours delightfully one evening in listening to Strauss’s band.  We went about sunset to the Odeon, a new building in the Leopoldstadt.  It has a refreshment hall nearly five hundred feet long, with a handsome fresco ceiling and glass doors opening into a garden walk of the same length.  Both the hall and garden were filled with tables, where the people seated themselves as they came, and conversed sociably over their coffee and wine.  The orchestra was placed in a little ornamental temple in the garden, in front of which I stationed myself, for I was anxious to see the world’s waltz-king, whose magic tones can set the heels of half Christendom in motion.  After the band had finished tuning their instruments, a middle-sized, handsome man stepped forward with long strides, with a violin in one hand and bow in the other, and began waving the latter up and down, like a magician summoning his spirits.  As if he had waved the sound out of his bow, the tones leaped forth from the instruments, and guided by his eye and hand, fell into a merry measure.  The accuracy with which every instrument performed its part, was truly marvellous.  He could not have